-> Heh ... travelling down to London by rail during and after WW2  
-> gave you a certain insecure feeling... 
  
Don't you know that, by British railway custom, the direction toward 
London is *always* UP! 
  
-> Being Xmas Eve and in the middle of a Royal Visit, the express was  
-> loaded and 151 people out of 285 passengers were killed... 
 
-> All other rail accidents in NZ pale beside this one,  and They are  
-> paranoiac about about another lahar;  the lake is brimming again,  
-> and so instrumented that heaving a stone into it creates a  
-> precautionary mobilisation of rescue forces. 
  
I vaguely remember the collision in Lewisham, near London, something 
like 40 or even 50 years ago. Two commuter trains collided, and 
hundreds of people were killed - far more than 151, I think. The system 
was heavily automated, and this kind of accident should have been 
impossible. It was eventually determined that the two trains must have 
tripped a couple of sensors within a thousandth of a second of each 
other. This fooled the system into thinking that only one train was 
present, and for some reason this led to it giving both of them green 
lights and applying power to both third-rails. 
  
                              dow 
--- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v3.0pr5